Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [130]
“If it were…” His voice faltered. He didn’t have a counterargument for this one, as it was perfectly true. There has to be a better way was easy to say. It was a lot harder to picture exactly how.
Returning to her subject, Hoharie said, “Fairbolt doesn’t much want to give you up, but he would for this. He can see a lot of the same things I do. He’s watched you for a long time.”
“I owe Fairbolt”—Dag lifted his left arm—“everything, pretty much. My arm harness was his doing. He’d spotted something like it in Tripoint, see. A farmer artificer and a farmer bonesetter over there had got together to fix things like it for some folks who’d lost limbs in mining and forge accidents. Neither of them had a speck of groundsense, but they had ideas.”
Hoharie began to speak, but then turned her head; in a moment, Fawn popped around the tent’s open side, looking equally pleased and anxious. “Hoharie! I’m so glad you’re here. How is he doing? Mari was worried.”
As if Fawn didn’t expect her own worry to count with the medicine maker? And is she so wrong in that?
Hoharie smiled reassuringly. “He mostly needs time and rest and not to do fool things.”
Dag said plaintively, not to mention horizontally, “How can I do fool things when I can’t do anything?”
Hoharie gave his query the quelling eyebrow twitch it deserved, and went on to give Fawn a set of sensible instructions and suggestions, which added up to food, sleep, and mild camp chores when ready. Fawn listened earnestly, nodding. Dag was sure she’d remember every word. And be able to quote them back at him, likely.
Hoharie rose. “I’ll send Othan down in a couple of days to pull those stitches out.”
“I can do that myself,” said Dag.
“Well, don’t,” she returned. She glanced down at him. “Think about what I said, Dag. If your feet—or your heart—ache too much to walk another mile, you could do a world of good right here.”
“I will,” he said, unsettled. Hoharie waved and took herself out.
Frowning, Fawn flopped down on her knees beside him and ran a small hand over his brow. “Your eyebrows are all scrunched up. Are you in pain?” She smoothed away the furrows.
“No.” He caught the hand and kissed it. “Just tired, I guess.” He hesitated. “Thinkin’.”
“Is that the sort of thinkin’ where you sit like a bump for hours, and then jump sideways like a frog?”
He smiled despite himself. “Do I do that?”
“You do.”
“Well, I’m not jumping anywhere today.”
“Good.” She rewarded this resolve with a kiss, and then several more. It unlocked muscles in him that he hadn’t known were taut. One muscle, at least, remained limp, which would have disturbed him a lot more if he hadn’t been through such convalescences before. Must rest faster.
Dag spent the next three days mired in much the same glazed lassitude. He was driven from his bedroll at last not by a return of energy, but by a buildup of boredom. Out and about, he found unexpectedly intense competition for the sitting-down camp chores among the ailing—Utau, Cattagus, and himself. He watched Cattagus, moving at about the same rate he did, and wondered if this was what it was going to feel like to be old.
There being no hides to scrape at the moment, and Utau and Razi having shrewdly been first in line to help Cattagus with his elderberries, Dag defaulted to nut-cracking; he had, after all, a built-in tool for it. He was awkward at first with the fiddly aspects, but grew less so. Fawn, who plainly thought the task the most tedious in the world, wrinkled her nose, but it exactly suited Dag’s mood, not requiring any thought beyond a vague philosophical contemplation of the subtle shapes of nuts and their shells. Walnuts. And hickory shells. Over and over, very reliably. They might resist him, but only rarely did they counterattack, the hickory being the more innately vicious.
Fawn kept him company, first spinning, then working on